Like Little Children

As you might have guessed by now, I was a little out of it yesterday. (And I'm not taking any pain pills or anything!) I was thinking the book contest ended yesterday, but it doesn't end until today. Soooo....This is the last day to enter the book giveaway. Click here and then leave a comment if you haven’t already done so. Contest ends at midnight tonight.

I did have a lot of time to think yesterday since I'm supposed to stay off the foot as much as possible. And I was thinking more about the Savior's admonition to become as a little child. Obviously that means to repent so that we, like little children, are exalted through the power of the Atonement. But there is more that He is asking of us here.

To be honest, the invitation to be as a little child used to bother me. As a young mother I noticed how selfish little children can be. If they want something and you tell them no, tempers can wreck havoc for hours. But there are other things that children do that we should emulate.

Think about it. One of the necessary pains of telestial life is learning to walk. When we were young we all did it. We can’t remember learning, but we’ve watched toddlers learn to walk and so we know that we fell down and hurt our knees. We stumbled into walls and knocked our heads. We slammed down on our back sides, and we cried over the hurts. But we got back up and kept trying until we could do it. We passed through the necessary pain and learned to walk. But as we grow older we use our agency to try and avoid the necessary pains of life and in so doing we create more pain—unnecessary pain.

I’ve often wondered how different our world would be if instead of being coordinated enough to walk while toddlers, we didn’t learn to walk until we were eight or nine years old. If that were the case, I’m sure only about half the population would ever learn to walk. The other half would still be crawling and saying things like, “If God intended for people to walk, they would be born walking. It’s unnatural to walk.” Or, “I can’t keep trying. It hurts too much when I fall.” Or “People laugh at me when I fall. I can’t stand to hear them laugh at me.” Or “I like the way I get around on all fours. Why should I change? Change takes too much effort.” Or “I try and try, but I can’t walk as well as Dad and Mom, so why try?” Or “Learning to walk shouldn’t be this difficult. I just don’t have the talent.” Or, “As soon as Susie put her feet on the ground she took off walking, but I keep falling. It just isn’t fair.”

No one told us we needed to walk. We just saw that people walk and so we learned to do it. In the same way we should look to the Savior and just do what He did--without excuses. Sure we'll fail sometimes, but trying is what little children do, and if we are to be like little children, we need to keep trying.